Meanwhile, the crisis seems to worsen at Fukushima nuclear plant. The ground around the plant and on the floors of the building was found to contain plutonium, only used in reactor 3 (out of six in the plant). Tetsuo Iguchi, a professor of isotope analysis at the University of Nagoya, said that "if the plutonium enters the bloodstream, it can damage our cells leading to cancer of the bones or liver."

Water was found in a tunnel outside of reactor 2, with radiation greater than 1 sievert per hour. Exposure for 30 minutes at such levels causes nausea, for four hours can lead to death within two months. The continued growth of radiation indicates that a partial melting of the fuel rods has taken place at the plant.

BERLIN - From the U.S. to Japan, it's illegal to drive a car without sufficient insurance, yet governments around the world choose to run over 440 nuclear power plants with hardly any coverage whatsoever.

Japan's Fukushima disaster, which will leave taxpayers there with a massive bill, brings to the fore one of the industry's key weaknesses — that nuclear power is a viable source for cheap energy only if it goes uninsured.

Governments that use nuclear energy are torn between the benefit of low-cost electricity and the risk of a nuclear catastrophe, which could total trillions of dollars and even bankrupt a country.

The bottom line is that it's a gamble: Governments are hoping to dodge a one-off disaster while they accumulate small gains over the long-term.

The cost of a worst-case nuclear accident at a plant in Germany, for example, has been estimated to total as much as €7.6 trillion ($11 trillion), while the mandatory reactor insurance is only €2.5 billion.

"The €2.5 billion will be just enough to buy the stamps for the letters of condolence," said Olav Hohmeyer, an economist at the University of Flensburg who is also a member of the German government's environmental advisory body.

The situation in the U.S., Japan, China, France and other countries is similar.

As Japan's disaster at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant unfolds in the wake of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, it is still unclear what the final cost might be.

Operator Tepco's shares have been battered, and analysts say Japan — which already has the highest debt level among the world's industrialized nations — might eventually have to nationalize the company, and take on its massive liabilities.

Tepco had no disaster insurance.

"Around the globe, nuclear risks — be it damages to power plants or the liability risks resulting from radiation accidents — are covered by the state. The private insurance industry is barely liable," said Torsten Jeworrek, a board member at Munich Re, one of the world's biggest reinsurance companies.

In Switzerland, the obligatory insurance is being raised from 1 to 1.8 billion Swiss francs ($2 billion), but a government agency estimates that a Chornobyl-style disaster might cost more than 4 trillion francs — or about eight times the country's annual economic output.

A major nuclear accident is statistically extremely unlikely when human errors, natural disasters or terror attacks are excluded, but the world has already suffered three in just about thirty years — Three Mile Island, Chornobyl and now Fukushima.

In financial terms, nuclear incidents can be so devastating that the cost of full insurance would be so high as to make nuclear energy more expensive than fossil fuels.

Governments could opt for a middle road, taking out more insurance to protect taxpayers from massive bills, but that would make the energy cost more. Ultimately, the decision to keep insurance on nuclear plants to a minimum is a way of supporting the industry.

"Capping the insurance was a clear decision to provide a non-negligible subsidy to the technology," Klaus Toepfer, a former German environment minister and longtime head of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), said.

Several countries advocate nuclear energy as a cleaner alternative to fossil fuels, even though there still is no solution for the permanent disposal of radioactive waste.

China, which is under international pressure to lower its use of coal and cut its carbon emissions, is betting on nuclear power to feed its rising energy demand.

It has an industry insurance pool covering damages only up to 300 million yuan ($46 million), and the government has another 800 million yuan ready to compensate victims, too little to cover damages in any meaningful way.

The situation is not much better among the veteran users of nuclear energy.

In the U.S., where no new reactors have been planned and completed since the 1979 Three Mile Island accident, the necessary insurance for nuclear operators is capped at just $375 million by law, with further claims funded by the utilities up to a maximum of $12.6 billion.

France, a country dotted with 58 reactors, only requires an insurance of €91 million from plant operators, with the government guaranteeing liabilities up to €228 million. The figures were similar for Britain, Russia and the Czech Republic. In Germany, each reactor operator is liable with all its assets beyond the insured amount of €2.5 billion.

Damage estimates for a worst-case nuclear disaster differ widely because it is difficult to forecast the spillover effects of a meltdown — death and illness from radiation, compensation for lost work and the economic impact of massive evacuations for years.

The cost of a nuclear meltdown at the Indian Point reactors some 24 miles north of New York City has been estimated at up to $416 billion in a 2009 study. But that does not take into full account the impact on one of the world's busiest metropolises.

"Indeed, a worst-case scenario could lead to the closure of New York City for years, as happened at Chornobyl, ... leading to almost unthinkable costs," University of Pennsylvania's Howard Kunreuther and Columbia University's Geoffrey Heal said.

A 1992 study for the German economy ministry — the latest official report available — found the total cost of health damage to the population and other economic losses by a nuclear disaster could amount to €5.5 trillion — or about €7.6 trillion in today's money.

Nuclear power plant operators could insure a larger, more realistic part of the potential damage, but experts note that that would lead to rising electricity prices.

The insurance in Germany costs utilities €0.008 cents ($0.015 cents) per kilowatt hour of electricity, a tiny part of the final cost for customers of about €22 cents, according to Bettina Meyer of think-tank Green Budget Germany in Berlin. But insuring the full risk would amount to a prohibitive extra cost of about €2 per kilowatt hour.

"If you take all external costs into account, the conclusion is inevitable: Nuclear power is not economically viable," Hohmeyer said. "The risk is only bearable if you externalize it on the wider society."

But Dieter Marx, of Germany's Nuclear Forum, an industry lobby, says no industry has prices reflecting all of its risks, adding that the risk of a meltdown was very low.

"Ultimately, it comes down to the question of how big a risk the society is ready to bear," he said.

The majority of Germans and the political parties have concluded that the potential damage outweighs the benefits, and the country now stands alone among industrialized nations in its determination to overcome nuclear power.

Phasing out nuclear energy — which like in the U.S. produces a quarter of the country's electricity — was meant to happen slowly over the next 25 years. But in the wake of Fukushima the government seems determined to speed things up, possibly pulling the plug on the last reactors within a decade, gradually replacing them with renewable energies.

"No society has to bear the potentially enormous risk of a nuclear disaster," Hohmeyer said.

___

Frank Jordans in Geneva, Camille Rusticci in Paris, Yu Bing in Beijing, Jon Fahey in Washington and Shino Yuasa in Tokyo contributed to this report.

The horrors of the US Agent Orange defoliation campaign in Vietnam, about which I wrote on Oct. 15, could ultimately be dwarfed by the horrors caused by the depleted uranium weapons which the US began using in the 1991 Gulf War (300 tons), and which it has used much more extensively–and in more urban, populated areas–in the Iraq War and the now intensifying Afghanistan War.

Depleted uranium, despite its rather benign-sounding name, is not depleted of radioactivity or toxicity. The term “depleted” refers only to its being depleted of the U-235 isotope needed for fission reactions in nuclear reactors. The nuclear waste material from nuclear power plants, DU as it is known, is what is removed from the power plants’ spent fuel rods and is essentially composed of the uranium isotope U-238 as well as U-236 (a product of nuclear reactor fission, not found in nature), as well as other trace radioactive elements.

Once simply a nuisance for the industry, that still has no permanent way to dispose of the dangerous stuff, it turns out to be an ideal metal for a number of weapons uses, and has been capitalized on by the Pentagon. 1.7 times heavier than lead, and much harder than steel, and with the added property of burning at a super-hot temperature, DU has proven to be an ideal penetrator for warheads that need to pierce thick armor or dense concrete bunkers made of reinforced concrete and steel. Once through the defenses, it burns at a temperature that incinerates anyone inside (which is why we see the carbonized bodies of bodies in the wreckage of Iraqi tanks hit by US fire).

Accordingly it has found its way into 30 mm machine gun ammunition, especially that used by the A-10 Warthog ground-attack fighter planes used extensively in Iraq and Afghanistan (as well as Kosovo). It is also the warhead of choice for Abrams tanks and is also reportedly used in GBU-28 and the later GBU-37 bunker buster bombs, each of which can have 1-2 tons of the stuff in its warhead.

DU is also used as ballast in cruise missiles, and this burns up when a missile detonates its conventional explosive. Some cruise missiles are also designed to hit hardened targets and reportedly feature DU warheads, as does the AGM-130 air-to-ground missile, which carries a one-ton penetrating warhead. In addition, depleted uranium is used in large quantities in the armor of tanks and other equipment. This material becomes a toxic source of CU pollution when these vehicles are attacked and burned.

While the Pentagon has continued to claim, against all scientific evidence, that there is no hazard posed by depleted uranium, US troops in Iraq have reportedly been instructed to avoid any sites where these weapons have been used—destroyed Iraqi tanks, exploded bunkers, etc.—and to wear masks if they do have to approach. Many torched vehicles have been brought back to the US, where they have been buried in special sites reserved for dangerously contaminated nuclear materials. (Thousands of tons of DU-contaminated sand from Kuwait, polluted with DU during the US destruction of Iraq’s tank forces in the 1991 war, were removed and shipped to a waste site in Idaho last year with little fanfare.)

Suspiciously, international health officials have been prevented or obstructed from doing medical studies of DU sites in Iraq and Afghanistan. But an excellent series of articles several years ago by the Christian Science Monitor described how reporters from that newspaper had visited such sites in Iraq with Geiger-counters and had found them to be extremely “hot” with radioactivity.

The big danger with DU is not as a pure metal, but after it has exploded and burned, when the particles of uranium oxide, which are just as radioactive as the pure isotopes, can be inhaled or ingested. Even the smallest particle of uranium in the body is both deadly poisonous as a chemical, and over time can cause cancer—particularly in the lungs, but also the kidneys, testes and ovaries.

There are reports of a dramatic increase in the incidence of deformed babies being born in the city of Fallujah, where DU weapons were in wide use during the November 2004 assault on that city by US Marines. The British TV station SKY UK, in a report last month that has received no mention in any mainstream American news organization, found a marked increase in birth defects at local hospitals. Birth defects have also been high for years in the Basra area in the south of Iraq, where DU was used not just during America’s 2003 “shock and awe” attack on Iraq, but also in the 1991 Gulf War.

Further, a report sent to the UN General Assembly by Dr Nawal Majeed Al-Sammarai, Iraq’s Minister of Women’s Affairs since 2006, stated that in September 2009, Fallujah General Hospital had 170 babies born, 24 percent of which died within their first week of life. Worse yet, fully 75 percent of the babies born that month were deformed. This compares to August 2002, six months before the US invasion, when 530 live births were reported with only six dying in the first week, and only one deformity. Clearly something terrible is happening in Fallujah, and many doctors suspect it’s the depleted uranium dust that is permeating the city.

But the real impact of the first heavy use of depleted uranium weaponry in populous urban environments (DU was used widely especially in 2003 in Baghdad, Samara, Mosul and other big Iraqi cities), will come over the years, as the toxic legacy of this latest American war crime begins to show up in rising numbers of cancers, birth defects and other genetic disorders in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Of course, as in the case of Agent Orange in Vietnam, the toxic effects of this latest battlefield use of toxic materials by the US military will also be felt for years to come by the men and women who were sent over to fight America’s latest wars. As with Agent Orange, the Pentagon and the Veterans Affairs Department have been assiduously denying the problem, and have been just as assiduously denying claims by veterans of the Gulf War and the two current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who claim their cancers and other diseases have anything to do with their exposure to DU.

The record on Agent Orange should lead us to be suspicious of the government’s claims.

The deformed and dead babies in Iraq should make us demand a cleanup of Iraq and Afghanistan, medical aid for the victims, and a ban on all depleted uranium weapons.

In the human body, iodine is taken up by the thyroid and becomes concentrated there, where it can lead to cancer in later life. Children who are exposed to iodine-131 are more likely than adults to eventually get thyroid cancer To guard against this risk, people can proactively take potassium iodide pills, which saturate the thyroid with non-radioactive iodine to block absorption of iodine-131.

Cesium-137 has a half-life of about 30 years, so it will take more than a century to decay significantly. Living organisms treat cesium-137 as if it were potassium; it becomes part of the body’s fluid electrolytes and is eventually excreted. It can cause many different types of cancer.

A meltdown occurs when fuel has overheated, melted, and flowed to the bottom of the reactor vessel, where it will burn its way through the steel and then collect on the floor of the primary containment structure.

It is possible to have a meltdown without a loss of primary containment; the containment is designed to hold the melted fuel and its radioactive emissions.

A loss of primary containment occurs when the integrity of the containment structure is compromised, allowing the melted fuel and/or radioactive isotopes to leak into the secondary containment. The loss of secondary containment would allow the melted fuel and/or radioactive isotopes to escape to the outside environment.

Back to topWhat is a “partial meltdown” and what is a “complete meltdown”?

“Meltdown” refers to damage to fuel rods due to excessive heating when the reactor’s cooling systems fail. Because of their high level of radioactivity, fuel rods in a reactor core or a spent fuel pool generate a lot of heat even if the reactor is not operating. So they must be surrounded by water that is circulated and cooled to carry heat away from the rods. If something disrupts this cooling, the fuel rods will heat up the water and eventually cause it to boil off.

If the water drops low enough to expose a significant length of a fuel rod, it will get hot enough that the zirconium cladding of the rod will start to oxidize (i.e., burn). This damage to the cladding will begin to allow the release of radioactive elements in the rod. If heating continues, the fuel pellets in the rod will start to release much larger amounts of radioactive gases. Eventually, the temperature can get high enough that the fuel pellets will begin to melt. If only a fraction of the fuel pellets melt, that is called a “partial meltdown.”

A partial meltdown will release large amounts of radioactivity. In general, that radioactivity and the damaged fuel will be contained in the steel reactor vessel, which is isolated from the environment by the reactor’s primary containment structure. That means that even if a partial meltdown occurs, it may not lead to a large release of radioactivity into the atmosphere, since it will be confined inside the reactor. That is what happened during the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979.

However, if a partial meltdown occurs in fuel that has been moved to a spent fuel pool, the radiation released is much more likely to get into the atmosphere. The pool is not surrounded by the same layers of confinement as the reactor vessel. In the case of the Fukushima reactors, explosions have damaged the reactor buildings, allowing radioactive gases from the spent fuel pool to be released directly into the atmosphere.

A “complete meltdown” can occur when the level of cooling water drops enough that the nuclear fuel in the reactor core is entirely uncovered. If a large quantity of fuel melts, the molten mass can run to the bottom of the metal reactor vessel and may remain hot enough to burn through the vessel floor. The mass would then drop onto the concrete floor of the primary containment. In the case of the Mark I containment used in the Japanese reactors, if the mass of molten fuel is large enough, it could spread to the metal containment wall and burn through it. If that happened, the containment would be breached and radioactivity would escape.

The situation is different for spent fuel pools. Since the pools are already outside primary containment, a complete meltdown would not necessarily be significantly worse than a partial meltdown, although the total amount of radioactive gases released would likely be larger in the former case. "

I love it how what would have been a dire health hazzard in and before february this year is now being spun as safe and " No cause for alarm".

The tell tale in the rubbish they want us to believe over this disaster is when you look up what was seen as dangerous and unacceptable before it happened. Suddenly all sorts of saftey levels have been elevated over night with no study, consultation or basis and all sorts of monitoring has been terminated so as to allow various authourities to claim they have not found any radioactivity/ contamination.

Bit like saying you haven't found any dust in your attic lateley when you haven't been up there in 5 years.

I have to admit I never believed in conspiracy theroies till this disaster came along but what i have seen with this has made me realise there is no limit to the lies and conspiracys that goverments and big businees will try to put over the population and the lengths they will go to in order to cover things up. I have always been a skeptic but this is just beyond what i would have ever thought possible.

Nuclear Power Is Extremely Safe -- That's the Truth About What We Learned From Japan

By Alex Epstein

Published July 23, 2011

In the midst of a still struggling and fragile global economy, Germany has announced that it will shut down seven nuclear plants by the end of the year--which means that Germans will be left to run their factories, heat their homes, and power their economy with 10% less electrical generating capacity. Nine more plants will be shut down over the next decade and tens of billions of dollars in investment will be lost.

The grounds for this move, and similar proposals in Switzerland, Italy, and other countries, is safety. As the Swiss energy minister put it, “Fukushima showed that the risk of nuclear power is too high.”

In fact, Fukushima showed just the opposite. How’s that? Well for starters, ask yourself what the death toll was at Fukushima. 100? 200? 10? Not true. Try zero.

To think rationally about nuclear safety, you must identify the whole context. As the late, great energy thinker Petr Beckmann argued three decades ago in his contrarian classic "The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear," every means of generating power has dangers and risks, but nuclear power “is far safer than any other form of large-scale energy conversion yet invented.”

To date, there have been devised only five practical means of producing large-scale, affordable, reliable energy: coal, natural gas, oil, hydroelectric, and nuclear. (Although widely-hyped and frequently subsidized, solar and wind power -- which generate energy from highly diffuse and intermittent sources -- have failed for forty years to deliver.) Whether you’re concerned about a dangerous accident or harmful emissions, a nuclear power plant is the safest way to generate power.

The key to nuclear power’s safety, Beckmann explains, is that it uses a radioactive energy source--such as uranium. In addition to having the advantage of storing millions of times more energy per unit of volume than coal, gas, or water, the radioactive material used in power plants literally cannot explode. Ridiculing the scare tactics that a nuclear power plant poses the same dangers as a nuclear bomb, Beckmann observes: “An explosive nuclear chain reaction is no more feasible in the type of uranium used as power plant fuel than it is in chewing gum or pickled cucumbers.”

The one danger of running a nuclear plant is a large release of radiation. This is extremely unlikely, because nuclear plants contain numerous shielding and containment mechanisms (universal in the civilized world but callously foregone by the Soviets in their Chernobyl plant).

But in the most adverse circumstances, as Fukushima illustrated, the cooling system designed to moderate the uranium’s heat can fail, the backups can fail, the radioactive material can overheat to the point that the plant cannot handle the pressure, and a radiation release is necessary.

Yet, even then, it is extremely unlikely that the radiation levels will be high enough to cause radiation sickness or cancer--and radiation in modest quantities is a normal, perfectly healthy feature of life (your blood is radioactive, as is the sun). And even the worst nuclear accident gives neighbors a luxury that broken dams and exploding refineries do not: time.

While many, many things went wrong at Fukushima, as might be expected in an unprecedented natural disaster, what is more remarkable is that thanks to the fundamental integrity of the nuclear vessel and the containment building, none of the power plant’s neighbors have died, nor have any apparently been exposed to harmful levels of radiation. (The Japanese government has announced that eight of 2,400 workers have been exposed to higher-than-allowed amounts of radiation, but these amounts are often hundreds of times less than is necessary to do actual damage.)

Now imagine if a 9.0 earthquake and 40 foot tsunami had hit a hydroelectric dam; thousands of people could have died in the ensuing flood.

Or what if they had hit a natural gas plant or oil refinery or coal plant? These structures could have suffered explosions, such as the type we saw on BP’s Deepwater Horizon platform in the Gulf of Mexico, or just collapsed and spewed debris and pollution throughout the area.

The Fukushima nuclear plants, with their incredible resilience, almost certainly saved many, many lives.

Nuclear power also saves lives that would otherwise be lost to pollution. A nuclear power plant has effectively zero harmful emissions. (It generates a small amount of waste, which France, among other countries, has demonstrated can be both re-used economically and stored safely.) By contrast, fossil fuel plants generate various forms of particulate matter that strongly correlate with higher cancer rates. We should not “‘knock coal,’” Beckmann stressed, as fossil fuel plants are vital for human survival for decades to come, but we should recognize that new nuclear power plants are far safer than the status quo.

The perversity of using nuclear power’s demonstrated safety as a black mark against it is not new. Beckmann’s book came out in 1976--three years before the Three Mile Island “disaster,” which nuclear critics capitalized on, even though it was, as Beckmann later wrote, “history’s only major disaster with a toll of zero dead, zero injured, and zero diseased.”

Still, environmentalists shut down nuclear plants, oblivious to the accidents they could have prevented.

In just the three years leading up to Three Mile Island, Beckmann observed, “dam disasters have killed thousands of people (at least 2,000 in India in August 1979); many hundreds have died in explosions and fires of gas, oil, butane, gasoline, and other fuels . . . ”

As a consequence of the anti-nuclear hysteria in Beckmann’s time, the U.S. government made it either impossible or economically prohibitive to build new plants, in the name of “safety.” Fukushima has affirmed that nuclear is the safest form of power in existence. Any government that fails to recognize this is endangering its citizens’ health.

Well for starters, ask yourself what the death toll was at Fukushima. 100? 200? 10? Not true. Try zero.

Ask yourself if car crashes don't matter if people are only maimed or injured or if the only ones that affect people is if they are killed.

Ask yourself if governments and big corporations stand to loose or gain by admitting the truth on Nuclear disasters or if they leave themselves to open to huge compensation claims and public outcry and if there are any vested interests they have at all in protecting the industries that cause these massive Disasters?

Come back and ask in 10-15 years how many people in japan and the US have cancer and what the increases is. You probably won't be able to ask how many got cancer from Fukishima because it will be buried and spin doctored like Cherynobyl and this very crock of chit here.

Ask yourself how long the cleanup is admittedly going to take and how much money it's going to cost. Ask yourself why the Russians are asking for international funding to build a new entombment around Chernoybl 25 years later.

Ask yourself how much land has been rendered useless by this disaster and how many people have had their lives changed forever because of it and will never be able to go back to the life they always knew.

Ask how many people have ever been detected pi$$ing radiation generated by coal or other forms of power generation and ask those that spin doctor things like how much radiation coal stations emit, what was the maximum dosage ever found in surrounding areas and how much has been found from Fukushima?

Ask what the REAL figure of radiation that has been released from Fukushima or look at how much nuclear fuel has been sprayed around from it and then compare that to how much radiation the spin doctors say comes from a coal plant.

Importantly, Ask yourself who the people are that post these sorts of garbage articles, what their credibility has been in the past, how well they stand by their arguments or go back and change their posts and what sort of evidence they post on issues or whether they tend to duck and weave honest questions and what their reactions are when they get backed into a corner. Ask if they ever admit they are wrong or are of a position they they are always right and will say anything to try to convince people they are infallible.

As with most things, there is a whole range of issues to be considered and no simple black and white answer.

Why do most people today, scientists included, believe that small doses of radiation are harmful to human health when no proof for this theory exists, and when mountains of evidence show the opposite — that small amounts of radiation actually promote health? After years of sleuthing into historical records, a scientist at the University of Massachusetts has found a smoking gun, involving a scientific scam in 1946 at the very highest echelons — the Nobel Prize ceremonies in Stockholm.

In an august Nobel hall one year after the end of the Second World War, the scientific world was knowingly misled by Hermann J. Muller, winner that year of the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. This is the verdict from a forensic review entitled Muller’s Nobel Prize Lecture: When Ideology Prevailed Over Science, just published by the Society of Toxicology in the Oxford University Press’s Toxicological Sciences. Had Muller spoken the truth and revealed the existence of contradictory research in the world’s most prominent scientific gathering, we might today have an entirely different view of radiation and its effects, preventing immense human suffering and the loss of countless lives.

Prior to the Second World War, the world of medicine saw radiation as a life-giving therapy as well as a diagnostic tool: Ordinary X-ray machines were widely used to zap more than two dozen different types of infections, gangrene among them, miraculously eliminating the need to amputate limbs. But science didn’t understand how exactly radiation worked its wonders, leading to conjecture that radiation, a known killer at very high doses, might do harm as well as good. One theory that arose held that radiation also killed at low doses, only in smaller proportions. This theory — that there is no safe dose for radiation — became the focus of a hot dispute, with one medical camp accepting it, the other rejecting it, and both investigating it.

Muller was in the ascendant “no safe dose” camp that claimed that there is no threshold below which radiation stops being harmful. As he told the distinguished attendees in Stockholm in accepting his Nobel Prize, the evidence now leaves “no escape from the conclusion that there is no threshold dose” of radiation. It was a convincing performance in the world’s most prestigious scientific gathering, except Muller himself knew that statement to be unsupportable. The historical evidence, as uncovered by Edward Calabrese, the author of the forensic review, leaves no escape from the conclusion that Muller was engaged in duplicity.

Five weeks before Muller delivered his Nobel acceptance speech, he had received a manuscript from Prof. Curt Stern, a prominent radiation geneticist who had headed a project for the Manhattan Project that had also employed Muller as a consultant. The manuscript confirmed an earlier study that demonstrated a safe dose. Muller responded to Stern in a private letter, saying he had no dispute with the study but felt that its findings were so significant to the debate that the new study needed to be replicated as soon as possible, a major undertaking that would take a year.

Muller then went to Stockholm to accept his Nobel Prize as if the manuscript had never existed. Another several weeks and Muller again wrote Stern, to again impress on him the importance of replicating the manuscript’s findings. As Calabrese’s expose reveals, Muller not only convinced the Nobel Prize assemblage that the science was settled on the danger of low levels of radiation, he also succeeded in marginalizing the Stern manuscript, effectively thwarting important lines of inquiry. Score one giant victory for scientific deception, one giant loss for truth in science.

What harm was done by Muller’s false assertion in Stockholm? Although the scientific world has recently rediscovered the benefits of low levels of radiation in a growing discipline called radiation hormesis — universities now offer courses in hormesis and scientific journals publish an increasing number of hormesis studies — Muller’s role in derailing research over many decades is undeniable. The costs have been incalculable. As good as antibiotics have been, for example, they continue to underperform the pre-Second World War success rate of X-ray therapy in preventing amputations and deaths from gangrene. Studies also show that routine exposure to low levels of radiation act as a tonic, dramatically preventing numerous diseases, including major killers such as heart disease and cancer.

Muller is now dead and buried, along with perhaps thousands, perhaps millions who met an untimely death in part because of him.

Financial PostLawrenceSolomon@nextcity.comLawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and author of The Deniers.

There is revival of interest in small and simpler units for generating electricity from nuclear power, and for process heat. This interest in small and medium nuclear power reactors is driven both by a desire to reduce the impact of capital costs and to provide power away from large grid systems. The technologies involved are very diverse.

As nuclear power generation has become established since the 1950s, the size of reactor units has grown from 60 MWe to more than 1600 MWe, with corresponding economies of scale in operation. At the same time there have been many hundreds of smaller power reactors built for naval use (up to 190 MW thermal) and as neutron sources, yielding enormous expertise in the engineering of small units.

Generally, modern small reactors for power generation are expected to have greater simplicity of design, economy of mass production, and reduced siting costs. Most are also designed for a high level of passive or inherent safety in the event of malfunction. A 2010 report by a special committee convened by the American Nuclear Society showed that many safety provisions necessary, or at least prudent, in large reactors are not necessary in the small designs forthcoming.

A 2009 assessment by the IAEA under its Innovative Nuclear Power Reactors & Fuel Cycle (INPRO) program concluded that there could be 96 small modular reactors in operation around the world by 2030 in its 'high' case, and 43 units in the 'low' case,...

Light water reactors

These are moderated and cooled by ordinary water and have the lowest technological risk, being similar to most operating power and naval reactors today. They mostly use fuel enriched to less than 5% U-235 with no more than 6-year refueling interval, and regulatory hurdles are likely least of any SMRs.

US experience of small light water reactors (LWRs) has been of very small military power plants, such as the 11 MWt, 1.5 MWe (net) PM-3A reactor which operated at McMurdo Sound in Antarctica 1962-72, generating a total of 78 million kWh. There was also an Army program for small reactor development, most recently the DEER (deployable electric energy reactor) concept which is being commercialised by Radix Power & Energy. DEER would be portable and sealed, for forward military bases. Some successful small reactors from the main national program commenced in the 1950s. One was the Big Rock Point BWR of 67 MWe which operated for 35 years to 1997. There is now a revival of interest in small LWRs in the USA, ...

Straight from the world Nuclear organisation.The feel good mouthpiece of an industry rotten to the core. How could anyone not believe the line they spin on how wonderful nuclear energy is despite the complete opposite it has proven to be for decades.

For those with Uber short memories, The Fukushima plant that blew up just on 2 years ago is still not safe or has stopped spewing radiation out. Even the feelgood spin doctors say the radiation leaks won't be stopped for years yet. Meanwhile contaminated fish and garbage are turning up around the world as is the the amount of Nuclear fallout increasing in the worlds oceans as a result of that event.

How anyone that purports to have half a brain, car for the environment and champions the additional of biodiesel into regular diesel because it burns cleaner and is better for the environment can be so stupid, gullible and ignorant as to promote nuke power is totally beyond me. Perhaps some are just deliberately ignorant for the sake of argument but are really going against what they believe and blind freddy can see a mile off.

It's not just about the reactors, it's about the deadly poison they leave behind that will never be safe no be able to be disposed of without risk and is in itself a ticking time bomb for future generations. Nuke power isn't clean or safe or anything but an unequalled danger and detriment to the entire plant and all those hat will inherit it for hundreds of years to come.

Perhaps Nuke isn't as dangerous though as those so ignorant, greedy and one eyed who will champion and try to justify it's continued use.

While ever such idiots are around, mankind is doomed and without hope.|It really is that simple.

ironic that BC Hydro wants to build a dam to supply natural gas liquefaction and coal mines with electricity- and the cons droool over subsidizing nuclear development to further subsidize the energy intensive tar sands//

It absolutely amazes me how people can still maintain that nuke power is safe and clean in the wake of so much evidence to the contrary. I'm not sure if it's more or lass amazing that gubbermints turn a blind eye to it as well. I guess where money comes in, nothing is beyond corruption and spin doctoring to the masses.

I found this interesting You tube clip on the Tar sands which gives some idea of the scale and devastation this environmental tragedy is creating. I have heard it spin doctored that the area was a contaminated waste land but this clip shows very much otherwise, it's a natural forest area!

I'm not sure how anyone can call an area polluted or contaminated when that is the way it is in it's natural state. Bit like saying a forest is polluted with trees or Rocks on the ground.

In any case, can anyone imagine how fked up this place would become if these companies could get their hands on nuke power? Who the hell is going to check it and oversee all the rules and regulations out there? The money involved and the ability to hide and cover up would mean every shortcut was taken and every corner cut till the whole thing blew itsef Sky high and wiped out another huge tract of the planet.

Man kind is so hell bent of destroying the planet and everything on it in order to make a buck along the way it makes a persons head spin.